Wikipedia:Project namespace

This page is a guideline for project and project talk pages. For information about WikiProjects, see Wikipedia:WikiProject. WP:Wikipedia space redirects here, for information about the mobile exhibit about Wikipedia and the Wikimedia community, see Wikipedia:WikipediaSpace.

It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. Any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

Project pages are for information or discussion about Wikipedia. They should be used to allow Wikipedians to better participate in the community, and not used to excess for unrelated purposes nor to bring the project into disrepute.

The project namespace or Wikipedia namespace is a namespace consisting of administration pages with information or discussion about Wikipedia. Pages in this namespace will always have the prefix Wikipedia:. They can also be reached by alias WP: or the standard (for any MediaWiki site) prefix Project:. Its namespace number is four (4).

Terminology

Project pages or Wikipedia pages are pages in the Wikipedia and Wikipedia talk namespaces. WikiProject pages, which are included in the Wikipedia namespace, are usually referred to as WikiProject pages to distinguish them from project pages as a whole.

Meta - Some people refer to pages in the project namespace as meta pages. However, this can be confusing, because Meta is actually the name of the site dedicated to all Wikimedia projects at en.turkcewiki.org.

Pages within the "Project namespace" themselves are not part of the encyclopedia proper. These administrative pages are intended for use by editors or by automated tools for the organization and governance of the encyclopedia. Consequently, they do not generally need to conform to the same content protocols or style conventions as articles. These pages, as with all pages, do, however, need to comply with Wikipedia's conduct and legal policies.

Pages within project namespace

The project namespace pages are organized according to their function within the overall project schema. This includes Wikipedia official policies and guidelines, process pages, discussion pages, optional essays, maintenance pages, informative pages, and historical pages.

A main gateway for the project namespace is Community portal. The Community Portal includes categorized links to the more commonly used pages related to the project. A link to the Community Portal page is available in the sidebar.

Discussion and noticeboard pages

Some pages are designed for discussions, such as the Village pumps. Others serve as noticeboards to draw attention to discussions taking place elsewhere, such as the centralized discussions page and various requests for comments pages. While many of these pages operate like talk pages, some of them have posting rules (at the top of the page) which may be administratively enforced, and they also have their own talk pages, usually about the management of the noticeboard or other process in question. To ask a question or make a request, see the request directory. For a listing of ongoing discussions and current requests, see the dashboard.

How-to and information pages

Informative and instructional pages are typically edited by the community; while not policies or guidelines themselves, they are intended to supplement or clarify Wikipedia guidelines, policies, or other Wikipedia processes and practices that are communal norms. Where essay pages offer advice or opinions through viewpoints, information pages should supplement or clarify technical or factual information about Wikipedia in an impartial way. In comparison to policies and guidelines, information pages, like essay pages, have a limited status, as they have not been thoroughly vetted by the community. These pages are typically marked with the {{Information page}}, {{Wikipedia how-to}}, or {{Supplement}}[1] template.

There is a large amount of overlap between the Help namespace (which provides mainly technical information) and the Wikipedia namespace (which provides mainly procedural information and interpretation). For this reason, redirects and hatnotes are often set up between these two namespaces. See Help:About help pages for more information. For a listing of how-to and information pages, see the help directory.

Essay pages

Essays about Wikipedia may be written by anyone; some represent widespread norms, others only represent minority viewpoints. Essays can be long monologues or short theses, serious or funny, informative or opinionated. Essays like information pages have no official status, and do not speak for the Wikipedia community as they may be created and edited without overall community oversight. Essays are typically marked with one of the various {{essay}} templates. See Wikipedia:Essays for more information. For a listing of essays, see the essay directory.

WikiProject pages

Pages of a WikiProject are the central place for editor collaboration and organization on a particular topic area. Many WikiProjects compose "advice essays" about how to apply Wikipedia's policies and guidelines to their specific subject area. Pages with Wikipedia:WikiProject prefix form a WikiProject pseudo-namespace. These pages are typically marked with the {{WikiProject status}} or {{WikiProject advice}} template. For a listing of projects, see the directory of WikiProjects. For additional resources, or if you have any questions, please visit the WikiProject Council.

Historical pages

A historical page or process is one which is no longer in use, or is no longer relevant or consensus has changed about its content. They are kept as a record of past Wikipedia processes of which are outdated that have a noteworthy value in being maintained. These pages are typically marked with the {{historical}}, {{superseded}} or {{dormant}} template. See HISTORICAL for more details.

The project namespace contains many pages and a lot of information. Try to avoid creating new pages unnecessarily. Before creating a new page, you should consider looking through the topical index, essay directory and help directory to see if the material belongs at a page that already exists. It is strongly recommended that you propose a WikiProject at the proposal page, if there are enough willing editors to participate in the project. Already existing WikiProjects can be found in the directory of WikiProjects.

Deletion of project pages

The usual deletion process is to post a request at miscellany for deletion to have project pages deleted. However, if editing can improve the page, this should be done rather than deleting the page. Disputes over page content are usually not dealt with by deleting the page, except in severe cases. The content issues should be discussed at the relevant talk page, and other methods of dispute resolution should be used first, such as listing on "requests for comments" for further input. Essays, information pages, and other informal pages that are only supported by a small minority of the community may be moved to the primary author's userspace over deletion. The Wikipedia community has historically tolerated a wide range of Wikipedia related subjects and viewpoints on user pages.

Policies, guidelines and process pages should not be nominated for deletion, as such nominations will probably be considered disruptive, and the ensuing discussions closed early. The {{Disputed tag}} template is typically used for claims that an essay, WikiProject advice or information page was recently assigned guideline or policy status without proper or sufficient consensus being established. See WP:Local consensus for more details.

It is generally preferable that inactive WikiProjects not be deleted, but instead be marked as {{WikiProject status|inactive}}, or redirected to a relevant WikiProject, or changed to a task force of a parent WikiProject, unless the WikiProject was incompletely created or is entirely undesirable. See WP:INACTIVEWP for more details.

Namespace history

The Wikipedia namespace began after the January 2002 release of the Phase II software. Prior to that, an index of related pages was maintained at Wikipedia utilities, which remained for some time afterwards at Wikipedia:Utilities. This list of pages in the project namespace has been replaced by the pages as described above.

Project namespace search

By default Wikipedia's search engine is restricted to the Article namespace. Typing the project page prefix Wikipedia: (Wikipedia followed by a colon) or WP: (WP followed by a colon) provides search results for the "Wikipedia namespace". You can also use the Special:Search box below to locate Wikipedia/Project namespace pages. See Help:Searching for more information.

Project namespace banners

Notes

^ The {{Supplement}} template is intended as a separate "supplement" banner used for pages derived from policy improvement conversations. The template does not indicate a "higher status" within the community for an essay, but is used to denote that the essay in question has wide acceptance to be linked from said policy or guideline page. See Template:Supplement for more information.